Sometimes a book series is so important that you want people to put everything aside and just read it. I'm not the only one who feels this way about N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy. The first and second novels in Jemisin's trilogy, The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate won the prestigious Hugo Award for the past two years in a row—the first time this has happened since Ender's Game and its sequel Speaker for the Dead won sequential Hugos in 1986 and 87. Now the final Broken Earth book, The Stone Sky, is out. You can gobble up the whole series without interruption.

There are very light spoilers ahead.

A mesmerizing world

There are a lot of reasons why this series has been hailed as a masterpiece. There are unexpected twists which, in retrospect, you realize have been carefully plotted, skillfully hinted at, and well-earned. There are characters who feel like human beings, with problems that range from the mundane (raising kids in a risky world) to the extraordinary (learning to control earthquakes with your mind). The main characters are called orogenes, and they have the ability to control geophysics with their minds, quelling and starting earthquakes. Somehow the orogenes are connected with the lost technologies of a dead civilization, whose machines still orbit the planet in the form of mysterious giant crystals called obelisks. To most people on the planet, the orogenes are known by the derogatory term "rogga," and they're the victims of vicious prejudice.

Further Reading

A few, very special orogenes are allowed to train at the Citadel, becoming masters at stopping earthquakes, volcanoes, and other natural disasters. They're still treated like second class citizens, and aren't permitted to live outside the Citadel for very long. But they are permitted some freedoms, and watching their powers emerge is a major part of what makes the first novel in the series so compelling.

But Jemisin is hardly retelling The X-men, only with orogenes instead of mutants. She's created a sociologically complex world, and the more we read, the more we understand how the orogenes fit into it. As we travel with our protagonists across the planet's single megacontinent, we discover the place is full of many cultures, often at odds with one another. The brown urbanites from the tropics think the pale, rural people of the poles are ugly idiots; the coastal people aren't too sure about the inland people; and of course everybody hates the orogenes. These tensions are part of a long and complex history that we learn more about as the series develops. There are a number of mysteries to unravel in this series, but one of them is understanding the devastating origin of prejudice against orogenes.

Combining the powers of science fiction and fantasy

Another mystery is what exactly powers the orogenes, the obelisks, and several other strange creatures with connections to the dead civilization. And this is where Jemisin's series has been a game changer, because she's deftly woven together the tropes of fantasy and science fiction so well that she makes it impossible to separate the two genres. Though Jemisin is hardly the first writer to do this, she's one of the leading lights in a movement among speculative writers to break down the boundaries between magic and science in their storytelling. In The Broken Earth, the results will surprise you with their devious complexity.

Further Reading

I don't want to give away any spoilers, but rest assured that Jemisin's goal is not to cheapen science, nor to create some kind of pseudo-rational magic system. Instead, she is exploring what you might call the common ancestor of both science and magic: the urge to exert our will over nature. Some call it sorcery; some call it geophysics; some call it whatever will allow them to manipulate the largest number of people.

One of the greatest pleasures of The Broken Earth is the way Jemisin uses geology as the cornerstone of her world-building. We get to explore a planet with a single megacontinent that's rifting apart in a series of catastrophic eruptions which are entirely plausible—indeed, it wasn't too long ago (in geological time) that Earth itself went through a similar process. And this planet has a rich geological history too, with multiple mass extinction events that have shaped the various ecosystems we encounter. It's rare to find an author who can convey both cultural and scientific nuance in a single story, but Jemisin has done it effortlessly. That's why she's been invited to speak at MIT as well as countless science fiction conventions.

Incredible storytelling

Jemisin wrote a number of critically-acclaimed novels before The Broken Earth trilogy, including the incredible Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. She is obviously at the top of her game. Her prose in the trilogy is gorgeous, disturbing, and often quite funny. The whole series is told in the second person, addressed to the main characters, which is incredibly difficult to pull off. Not only does Jemisin make it work, but her stylistic choice has the eerie effect of making it feel as if the novels are addressed directly to us, the audience. By the third novel, we get a satisfactory explanation for why the story had to be told this way, but not before it contributes to several fascinating plot twists.

The Broken Earth is exciting, full of incredible technology, and powered by a dark historical mystery. It's something you can read to escape, or to ponder philosophical questions in our own world. In short, it's that rare series that appeals to a love of adventure, and to the urge to reflect on the unseen forces that drive our civilizations.

189 Reader Comments

I don't make absolutist statements like the one in this headline very often

Yes you do. I often have to stop and force myself before reading one of your articles, because everything is groundbreaking and will blow my mind, and as an introvert that's the surest way to put me off a story. Yet I know you're still a great writer and when I manage to fight my aversion for those sensationalist headlines I come to Ars to avoid, I'm usually rewarded with a solid piece of information.

In the present case no, I don't believe we can say it has changed sci-fi, that subtitle is a sensationalist falsehood that belongs to the Huffington Post. It might change sci-fi, and I wouldn't mind, but we'll only be able to say that in many years, when we can look back and see how a multitude of sci-fi authors draw inspiration from it. At the moment, it's materially impossible - the stories changed by this trilogy are still in the writing, and who knows what they will be (in the event that this series will have changed sci-fi of course).

Great article though by the way, 3 books to add to my reading list, and overworked as I am those days it's not often a writer manages to interest me that much in a book (last was the Three Body Problem, also from an Ars review ages ago...)

I’ve been reading science fiction since I was ten, 57 years ago, and own thousands of those books, still. I’ve read every major writer, and every major book, and Series (plus many minor ones). I’ve read a number of books, and series from non English writers once they were in translation.

I give that background so that I can say that I can compare these to the best, and most transformative works.

I’ve now read the first two of these, and expect to be reading the final one shortly. So while I haven’t finished the series yet, I have a very good idea of what it’s about.

So, how good are these? They’re very good indeed. She is a very good writer. Having grandiose ideas alone doesn’t make for a good book. But she has both. I can recommend these to anyone without question.

Now, has this changed science fiction? No, it hasn’t. While these books (at least the first two that I’ve read so far) are written very well, so are others. While they encompass very interesting ideas, so have others. In fact, the basis of these books isn’t new. The concepts have been used before, a number of times.

I’m not trying to write a review here, so I won’t talk about the books in particular, but while she puts everything together very well, there’s nothing revolutionary here. Many SF writers have written extensively on social matters, political matters, technology and how they entwine themselves into futures that may not leave us as what present day people would even consider as human.

Some authors have done this better than others, and her books are certainly up there. But they haven’t changed SF in any way.

I had just finished the Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne trilogy a few months ago. Really great writing. Maybe not the greatest story but still fun to read. It's almost like an alternate reality Game of Thrones. I started reading The Fifth Season but the adjustment was so jarring. I'll give it another go at it, though, since it's been praised on so many reputable sites.

Is it sci fi or is it fantasy? I'm not buying the idea that they overlap very much or have a common root. I will try the first book in the series to test it out, but please don't add to the confusion between two deservedly separate genres.

Sci fi must be scientifically plausible and does not rely on magic or religion. Fantasy employs elements apart from physics (even pretend physics) that have no boundaries related to science. I can only think that sci fi and fantasy became grouped on library shelves because some librarian ran out of space on the name tags marking the end of each row.

Is it sci fi or is it fantasy? I'm not buying the idea that they overlap very much or have a common root. I will try the first book in the series to test it out, but please don't add to the confusion between two deservedly separate genres.

...

Just curious... How would you classify Charles Stross' Laundry novels? They're sort of obviously Gothic Horror but there's a 'scientific' explanation for everything that happens.

Is it sci fi or is it fantasy? I'm not buying the idea that they overlap very much or have a common root. I will try the first book in the series to test it out, but please don't add to the confusion between two deservedly separate genres.

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Just curious... How would you classify Charles Stross' Laundry novels? They're sort of obviously Gothic Horror but there's a 'scientific' explanation for everything that happens.

Accelerando (or at least the first half of it) is probably my favorite sci fi book. I tried to read the Laundry series and only got about 20 pages into the first book before I choked on the fantasy. If there is a "scientific" explanation for everything that happens, it is a stretched one that feels shallow and unreal to me. But I get your point.

Is it sci fi or is it fantasy? I'm not buying the idea that they overlap very much or have a common root. I will try the first book in the series to test it out, but please don't add to the confusion between two deservedly separate genres.

...

Just curious... How would you classify Charles Stross' Laundry novels? They're sort of obviously Gothic Horror but there's a 'scientific' explanation for everything that happens.

Is it sci fi or is it fantasy? I'm not buying the idea that they overlap very much or have a common root. I will try the first book in the series to test it out, but please don't add to the confusion between two deservedly separate genres.

Sci fi must be scientifically plausible and does not rely on magic or religion. Fantasy employs elements apart from physics (even pretend physics) that have no boundaries related to science. I can only think that sci fi and fantasy became grouped on library shelves because some librarian ran out of space on the name tags marking the end of each row.

It's hard to separate science from magic, when the "science" in SF doesn't exist today.

Shame so many book authors make complete asses of themselves on social media, I miss the days when I had no idea the person who wrote the book was an arse. Her views and attitude put me off reading the trilogy, much like I find it hard nowadays to pick up a book by Orson Scott Card considering his views. The article's author seems falls into the group of liberal leaning people who tend to overhype whatever book/author aligns more closely with their ideals. Much like Ann Leckie's sci-fi trilogy was hyped and kept being praised as some sort of gamechanger but it was just a solid series. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go read some trashy military sci-fi written by a lady.

Shame so many authors make complete asses of themselves on social media, I miss the days when I had no idea the person who wrote the book was an arse. Her views and attitude put me off reading the trilogy, much like I find it hard nowadays to pick up a book by Orson Scott Card considering his views. The article's author seems falls into the group of liberal leaning people who tend to overhype whatever book/author aligns more closely with their ideals. Much like Ann Leckie's sci-fi trilogy was hyped and kept being praised as some sort of gamechanger but it was just a solid series. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go read some trashy military sci-fi written by a lady.

I don't have a clue about the author or they political views, I can just say they didn't influence the story at least as far as I can see it.

Ann Leckie's sci-fi trilogy was hyped and kept being praised as some sort of gamechanger but it was just a solid series.

Yes. The social construction in the book's world that all the reviewers grabbed on to in the series turned out to be an entirely extraneous, annoying bolt-on to an otherwise fine story. Had it made a difference to the plot, it would have made the books better. As it did not do the former, it certainly didn't do the latter.

How does the series stack up against Hyperion and the Hyperion Cantos, Pandora's Star, Excession, Ender's Game?

I'm looking for something exceptional to read...

You sir, have just named off 3 of my favourite books/series of all time.

Therefore I have to now check out Excession! Thank you!

And Annalee....

""I don't make absolutist statements like the one in this headline very often...""

Yes. You do.

If you enter the Culture universe, be prepared to stay a while. Excession is my favorite book in that group. Iain M. Banks, rest his soul, will be missed. My first Culture book was "Surface Detail". I then went back and read them all.

Is it sci fi or is it fantasy? I'm not buying the idea that they overlap very much or have a common root. I will try the first book in the series to test it out, but please don't add to the confusion between two deservedly separate genres.

Sci fi must be scientifically plausible and does not rely on magic or religion. Fantasy employs elements apart from physics (even pretend physics) that have no boundaries related to science. I can only think that sci fi and fantasy became grouped on library shelves because some librarian ran out of space on the name tags marking the end of each row.

If your SF has pretend physics, it's not scientifically plausible. The difference between "fantasy with internally consistent magic" and "science fiction with pretend physics" is more about reader demographics than about science. In the last 30 years of Hugo novel winners I count only 7 novels that don't violate known physics: The Windup Girl*, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Rainbows End, A Deepness in the Sky, Blue Mars, The Diamond Age, and Green Mars.

*Actually, scratch that, I just remembered the spring energy storage made out of unobtainium.

Accelerando (or at least the first half of it) is probably my favorite sci fi book. I tried to read the Laundry series and only got about 20 pages into the first book before I choked on the fantasy. If there is a "scientific" explanation for everything that happens, it is a stretched one that feels shallow and unreal to me.

<snip>Great article though by the way, 3 books to add to my reading list, and overworked as I am those days it's not often a writer manages to interest me that much in a book (last was the Three Body Problem, also from an Ars review ages ago...)

Agreed, I tried to resist reading Three-Body-Problem at first, but T3BP surely changed maybe not Sci-Fi in general, but at least 'my SciFi' as well as the one of the people in my local Sci-Fi-group...

There are only a few books populating the same high level as T3BP. In my opinion:- The Ender books- The Gap series- The Hyperion cantos- 2312

I am quite sure there are other hidden jewels out there or in shaping, but from what I read here, I doubt Broken Earth will be among them - but it sounds very intriguing nevertheless... +3 Books.

Though Jemisin is hardly the first writer to do this, she's one of the leading lights in a movement among speculative writers to break down the boundaries between magic and science in their storytelling.

That makes zero sense to me.

Firstly, because people have been writing stories like this for ages and ages. Read a lot of 60s and 70s scifi and you'll trip all over it. And it's a rare Andre Norton novel that doesn't straddle the line st least a bit, and then later you have writers like C.J. Cherryh, and I could go on. Hell, even the Song Of Ice And Fire novels take high-fantasy suppositions and marry them to a far more science-fiction-y approach to the world, up to and including the fact that the murky origin myths appear to (from the nondiagetic perspective of a reader) subtly tie the origins of dragons in the world to the wonkiness of the seasons via an astrophysical event...

Secondly, because not all stories would benefit from this. Some, it's intrinsic to the story that magic is real. Others the "hard-scifi" approach is key to the work. I trend more towards the latter, so I wouldn't be too upset if fantasy novels more frequently thought through their physics and metaphysics (or even just sociology) more thoroughly, but it's not even a linear scale and not all stories can or should be told with the same orientation towards the nature of reality.

These books may well be good, and indeed I trust the consensus here that they are. But I struggle from the article to see how this is the spearhead of a new "movement", or why that's such a thing to be heralded. Sounds more like the author has just done their due diligence in creating a coherent world that doesn't fall apart upon a reader's reflection on it, and that that's one well-written aspect of the novels amongst apparently others. Cool! Sounds worth reading! But hardly anything that's liable to radically change "genre" fiction.

The Fifth Season was very good. I got about 90% of the way through The Obelisk Gate, and have no desire to continue into the third book. The world-building was very good, the mythology and teleology not so much. And the characters are ... OK, I guess.

Still, better than the Three Body Problem and Expanse series. The former was pedestrian, its novelty being the nationality of the author, and the latter lost its noir-ish feel too quickl.

By the way, all of theses series are fantasy, not science fiction. The "technologies" flatly contradict known physics and geology.

Is it sci fi or is it fantasy? I'm not buying the idea that they overlap very much or have a common root. I will try the first book in the series to test it out, but please don't add to the confusion between two deservedly separate genres.

Sci fi must be scientifically plausible and does not rely on magic or religion. Fantasy employs elements apart from physics (even pretend physics) that have no boundaries related to science. I can only think that sci fi and fantasy became grouped on library shelves because some librarian ran out of space on the name tags marking the end of each row.

If your SF has pretend physics, it's not scientifically plausible. The difference between "fantasy with internally consistent magic" and "science fiction with pretend physics" is more about reader demographics than about science. In the last 30 years of Hugo novel winners I count only 7 novels that don't violate known physics: The Windup Girl*, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Rainbows End, A Deepness in the Sky, Blue Mars, The Diamond Age, and Green Mars.

*Actually, scratch that, I just remembered the spring energy storage made out of unobtainium.

How many do we toss out if we extend "science" to be anything other than physics?

Is it sci fi or is it fantasy? I'm not buying the idea that they overlap very much or have a common root. I will try the first book in the series to test it out, but please don't add to the confusion between two deservedly separate genres.

Sci fi must be scientifically plausible and does not rely on magic or religion. Fantasy employs elements apart from physics (even pretend physics) that have no boundaries related to science. I can only think that sci fi and fantasy became grouped on library shelves because some librarian ran out of space on the name tags marking the end of each row.

If your SF has pretend physics, it's not scientifically plausible. The difference between "fantasy with internally consistent magic" and "science fiction with pretend physics" is more about reader demographics than about science. In the last 30 years of Hugo novel winners I count only 7 novels that don't violate known physics: The Windup Girl*, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Rainbows End, A Deepness in the Sky, Blue Mars, The Diamond Age, and Green Mars.

*Actually, scratch that, I just remembered the spring energy storage made out of unobtainium.

I see your point, but I think it's a bit more complex than that. I don't think they're one and the same genre, but neither do I think they don't overlap, nor are they two distinct genres necessarily either; they're multiple aspects that can vary wildly between books in the levels of each. For instance I think there's a lot of difference between a work that's entirely within the bounds of known physics with little speculation, and a novel that's entirely within the bounds of physics but is finding some far-flung corners and making defensible but far-fetched speculations. But then there can be a huge difference between something at the far end of that plausibility spectrum and High Fantasy like Tolkein, or even just space fantasy like Star Wars.

Take the novel Starplex, for instance. It posits a lot of things that in our understanding of physics seem pretty damn impossible, starting from the FTL travel that underpins it and the Star Trek style setting it's going for. But then the concerns of the plot are very rooted in real world physics (I won't say precisely how because that'd be a bit spoiler-y, so in retrospect maybe this was a bad example to pick but whatever!). We're going beyond known physics and largely making up things with a thin veneer of plausibility, but it's largely in pursuit of contemplating larger aspects of real-life science and what it implies about our universe. So while there are aspects that are quite fantastical, there's a distinct orientation of the work that sets it aside from "fantasy", even fantasy with internal consistency.

I think that the fundamental problem here is that categorization is the wrong way to think about things. It's often very soothing to put things into boxes, but of course the messy world (even just of human-created things like fiction) doesn't provide us with such bright boundaries. But instead of collapsing them into one single "science fiction and fantasy" box, I think we should give up on that altogether. It hearkens back to physical libraries and bookstores, where these categories are conveniences of necessity. We should probably be thinking of it more like tags than categories; any work can have multiple aspects, we don't have to file them under a single heading.

So in a Gmail-like reconception of genres, a work like the one reviewed here wouldn't be "scifi" or "fantasy". We'd just attach tags, for example "fantasy" but also "geology", a specific tag for the trope of a magically-empowered underclass, etc etc. And for instance The Expanse series would start out with a "hard sci-fi" tag, perhaps with a tag for the sole exception from modern science it starts out with (a ridiculously fuel-efficient method of thrust) alongside tags for being concerned with escalation towards war, being set in our solar system, and a "noir" tag for Miller's storyline, dropping that "noir" tag and accumulating other tags as it goes on, or just having a whole constellation of tags if you're taking the series as a whole.

Physical books aren't going away anytime soon, and so I'm sure we'll be arguing Sci-Fi vs. Fantasy for the rest of our lifetimes. But i think, in our digital age, we can think of a better framework in which to classify works of fiction than broad is-or-isn't categories.

The point is that we are really missing something if we don't read this series. It is a great story with great characters. It was well worth my time.

I don't often tell friends and family to read a book, but I have been going out of my way to tell people about this series and the author, N.K. Jemison.

"The Inheritance Trilogy" is not as good, but worth a read also.

I may have to give these a shot. I read the first of Inheritance, but something about it felt off to me, and couldn't convince myself to read the rest. I suspect it was something related to her political or racial views coming through a little too strongly for me, which I found after the fact.

The book is listed on Wikipedia as Science Fantasy. A genre that represents elements of both science fiction AND fantasy. Apparently others also feel it draws on the two genres.

Edit: I tried to find other sources for the genre, but it seems Amazon, Google Books and Chapters aren't listing a genre in their product description.

I could see this as Science fiction as I could also see the world of Numenara as science fiction. I think the biggest separation which people don't get is like others said a scientific explanation and if the items are technologically powered or hand waving physics magic powered. Case in point being say the world of Nightfall after the once a millennium setting of the suns. This seems to fit squarely in the post apocalyptic, dark age rebuilding phase like Numenara so seems to fit sci-fi to me.